August 15th, 2014 - Chaun Webster

Ten years ago my partner and I were two months in to running a bookstore down the block from our house, a bookstore that we would call Ancestry Books.  At the time we understood Ancestry to be a spatial intervention, an attempt to interrupt the over determined relationship between space and capital, a hope that with the careful curation of cultural objects by folks who loved them and gatherings where we could read and share or just shoot the shit that we could generate or at the very least hold other kinds of relation.  

We were grasping at something in a dark room with the guideposts of the African National Memorial Bookstore in Harlem, run the by the brilliant Lewis Michaux, the (at the time) newly opened La Casa Azul Bookstore run by Aurora Anaya-Cerda and many local examples ranging from the history of Uhuru Books and the present example of Birchbark Books and Native Arts.  We wanted to make something beautiful.

However, this desire to make something beautiful was nested in a summer that was bracketed by terror.  Not even a month after we opened Ancestry Books we learned of the murder of Eric Garner by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in Staten Island captured on the cell phone of Ramsey Orta haunted by Garner’s repeated articulation of “I can’t breathe” while he was being strangled to death.  This flagrant spectacle of murder caught on video, would be among many that year that would be punctuated by a lack of indictment.  

The day before August 15th, 2014 we closed the bookstore early to participate in a local march that was in protest to the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri by police officer Darren Wilson.  Brown’s body was left on the street for all to view for four hours, and his murder and the events that followed became a lesson in the use of grand jury’s to manufacture the exoneration of police.  Black residents of Ferguson and many across the country who were traveling to Ferguson were in protest while we would watch as democratic President Barack Obama would situate the unrest in Ferguson as violence for which he said their was no excuse, but the murder of Michael Brown, though a tragedy, would not be understood under the grammar of violence or even described as murder.  

I was learning something about the particularness of the grammar of violence black folks were and are up against, the way it was naturalized, and how casually the state, as then democratic Governor of Missouri Jay Nixon, would use military terminology to call for the end of unrest saying that the residents who had just witnessed the horror of Michael Brown’s lifeless body laid out in the street for hours needed to “stand down.”

It was jarring.  And that summer would mark a shift in how I would understand violence and failure as I was almost immediately confronted with the limitations of the experiment of our bookstore.  It was a moment where I thought that representation had a closer relationship to virtue than I do now, a moment where I gained an appreciation for the ugly truth of how state terror could be facilitated by hands that looked like mine in the service of anti blackness or global imperialism.  I didn’t learn this because of our little bookstore, however it would become a kind of laboratory, a space of study that involved reading but also other touch points of critical thinking about the rapidly shifting pieces of a neoliberal state.  

And I say all this knowing that my own recounting of this moment is limited, a fragment bound up in my own contradictions.  I say all this knowing that the violence of that summer was not new, but it did reorient my own assessment of state rituals of violence, and the kind of interventions I am best equipped to be a part of.  Even as I am reflecting now I thought initially that I would be describing more about a bookstore, about my own love of those objects a bookstore holds, but my reflection of ten years ago is not disconnected from my feeling of the moment I am in now, of the years that led up to it, of this thick atmosphere of violence marked by multiple genocides.  It is not disconnected from my own sense of the many errors I was making ten years ago, my dense hopes in the possibility of language, but I feel I am in that dark room again, still grasping for something, still unsure of what.

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Chaun Webster is a poet and graphic designer living in Minneapolis whose work is attempting to put pressure on the spatial and temporal limitations of writing, of the english language, as a way to demonstrate its incapacity for describing blackness outside of a regime of death and dying. Webster’s books include, Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime published by Noemi Press in 2018, and  Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world, published by Black Ocean in 2023.  Both books were awarded the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry.